"

Marcella shrank.

"I don't wonder you say that!" she said in a low voice. "Do you think it
was all a mistake, mamma, my going away eighteen months ago--a wrong
act?"

Mrs. Boyce grew restless.

"I judge nobody, my dear!--unless I am obliged. As you know, I am for
liberty--above all"--she spoke with emphasis--"for letting the past
alone. But I imagine you must certainly have learnt to do without us.
Now I ought to go to your father."

But Marcella held her.

"Do you remember in the _Purgatorio_, mamma, the lines about the loser
in the game: 'When the game of dice breaks up, he who lost lingers
sorrowfully behind, going over the throws, and _learning by his grief_'?
Do you remember?"

Mrs. Boyce looked down upon her, involuntarily a little curious, a
little nervous, but assenting. It was one of the inconsistencies of her
strange character that she had all her life been a persistent Dante
student. The taste for the most strenuous and passionate of poets had
developed in her happy youth; it had survived through the loneliness of
her middle life. Like everything else personal to herself she never
spoke of it; but the little worn books on her table had been familiar to
Marcella from a child.

"_E tristo impara?_" repeated Marcella, her voice wavering. "Mamma
"--she laid her face against her mother's dress again--"I have lost more
throws than you think in the last two years. Won't you believe I may
have learnt a little?"

She raised her eyes to her mother's pinched and mask-like face. Mrs.
Boyce's lips moved as though she would have asked a question. But she
did not ask it. She drew, instead, the stealthy breath Marcella knew
well--the breath of one who has measured precisely her own powers of
endurance, and will not risk them for a moment by any digression into
alien fields of emotion.

"Well, but one expects persons like you to learn," she said, with a
light, cold manner, which made the words mere convention. There was
silence an instant; then, probably to release herself, her hand just
touched her daughter's hair. "Now, will you come up in half an hour?
That was twelve striking, and Emma is never quite punctual with his
food."

* * * * *

Marcella went to her father at the hour named. She found him in his
wheeled chair, beside a window opened to the sun, and overlooking the
Cedar Garden. The room in which he sat was the state bedroom of the old
house. It had a marvellous p